Preface

Why This Book?

You've picked up this book for a reason. You think it's important to know who is using the products you're making. And, you know, you're right. Finding out who your customers are, what they want, and what they need is the start of figuring out how to give it to them. Your customers are not you. They don't look like you, they don't think like you, they don't do the things that you do, they don't have your expectations or assumptions. If they did, they wouldn't be your customers; they'd be your competitors.

This book is designed to help you bridge the gap between what you think you know about your users and who they really are. It's not an academic treatise. It's a toolbox of ideas with which you can understand how people are going to experience the environment you're creating for them. The techniques—taken from the worlds of human-computer interaction, marketing, and many of the social sciences—help you know who your users are, to walk in their shoes for a bit.

In addition, the book is about the business of creating usable products. It acknowledges that product development exists within the complexities of a business venture, where the push and pull of real-world constraints do not always allow for an ideal solution. Usability is a dirty business, full of complexities, uncertainties, and politics. This book will, if it serves its purpose, help you tame some of that chaos and gain some clarity and insight into how to make the world a little better by making something a little easier to use than it was before.